Here, you are urged and encouraged to run your mouths about something important.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Project Gunrunner: What if Agent John Dodson hadn't Talked?

When the Project Gunrunner scandal broke several months ago, there was one man - ATF Agent John Dodson - who put everything at risk by coming forward. He is an American hero and patriot. Dodson blew the whistle on a secret program administered by the ATF to allow guns to be bought by 'straw purchasers.' Operation Fast and Furious then allowed those weapons to 'walk' into Mexico. What prompted Dodson to come forward then was the revelation that one of those guns was found at the murder scene of Border agent Brian Terry.

As we learn more about this covert operation, it's becoming apparent that the program was put in place to target gun dealers in the United States and portray them as irresponsible when, in reality, their own government was setting them up to justify tougher gun controls. Kathleen Millar explores an alternative scenario, one that might have transpired had Dodson remained silent.

First, no one seems to know if Fast and Furious was, in fact, a legitimate operation, one built and played ‘by the book.’ No one at ATF, or anywhere else, seems to have any paperwork (that they want to share) on the operation.

Second, if one of the weapons that made its way into the hands of a Mexican gunman via the ATF operation was the same weapon used to murder US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, killed last December on US soil, it suggests that, at a very early stage, ATF lost control (to the Mexican military? To Federal Police? To the cartels?) of the operation. Why and how?

Third, if ATF Agent John Dodson had not blown the whistle and revealed that an ATF operation called Fast and Furious was in play, no one could have linked the weapon found at Terry’s murder site to an operation that had to have been initiated and approved by high-levels officials at ATF and DOJ—and that story would have benefited not just Mexico, but proponents of stronger gun regulation here in the US, and in the US government, as well. Win-win.

The straw that broke ATF Agent Dodson’s back? Why he ‘blew the whistle’?

The realization that the weapon used to kill a fellow agent had fallen into the hands of his murderers via an operation sanctioned and implemented by US authorities.

Factor in the ‘rest of the story’ about the attack on Agent Terry and several other Border Patrol agents on December 14 in Peck Canyon, north of Nogales on US soil—ie, that our guys had been instructed by superiors to fire bean bags, as opposed to live ammunition, at their assailants—and you start to understand why even a career ATF agent close to retirement might just throw caution to the wind.

A little later, Millar explores in greater detail, what might have happened had Dodson remained silent:

The perfect PR storm–if Dodson hadn’t talked

Dodson’s decision to lay out the connections between the weapon that killed fellow-Agent Brian Terry and an ATF operation he clearly viewed as poorly conceived and improperly (if not illegally) implemented made the current congressional investigation into Fast and Furious inevitable.

But let’s say Agent Dodson hadn’t talked.

Let’s just suppose.

The AK-47 used to gun down fellow federal agent Brian Terry, once recovered, would no doubt have been identified by ATF as a weapon recently purchased from a US gun dealer on the southwest border (ATF would have had, after all, the serial numbers and other identifying documentation).

There would have been no need to mention the existence of any ATF ‘secret sting,’Operation Fast and Furious, or any links between these ATF endeavors and the movement of the weapon used to murder Terry across the US border and into the hands of his Mexican assailants.

US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry

Instead, the discovery and identification of the AK-47 used to gun down a US agent as one sold by a US gun dealer and then trafficked ‘illegally’ over the border into Mexico and into the possession of the cartels might have created a ‘perfect PR storm,’ neatly reinforcing the arguments put forth, first, by Mexico’s government, which contends there would be no gang violence in that country if the US didn’t supply gangs with guns; second, by higher-ups in the US government who favor tougher gun-control laws and non-intervention in Mexico (DOJ and the Obama Administration); and, third, by the public anti-gun lobby in America.

Indeed, here’s how that story would have read: Mexico’s claim re the US fueling cartel violence is right, and worse yet, weapons trafficked from the US are no longer being used just to murder Mexicans, but to kill Americans as well.